INFEWS/T1: A Modeling Framework to Understand the coupling of Food, Energy, and Water in the Teleconnected Corn and Cotton Belts

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The resilience of U.S. agriculture is significantly impacted by increasing climate extremes, growing population demands, and evolving land use. This project will develop, evaluate, and apply a model of the coupled Food, Energy, and Water (FEW) systems across the Corn and Cotton Belts of the Midwest, Southeast and Great Plains. The study will evaluate food crops currently grown in these Belts as well as the potential for growing bioenergy crops on marginal land. The project will: (1) develop a FEW model framework that represents the coupled nature of food and bioenergy production and water and its responses to environmental forcings and human interventions; (2) enhance understanding of key feedback mechanisms within FEW systems; (3) determine potential thresholds in FEW systems that would indicate damage to the resilience of U.S. agriculture and water resources. The project will provide training for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in transdisciplinary research where cross-fertilization of ideas is central. Building upon existing partnerships with Minority-Serving Institutions, the project will also involve minority students through summer internships. This project will integrate state-of-the-art knowledge and modeling across the climate, hydrologic, agronomic, biogeochemical, engineering, and economic sciences. The project will use this integrated model to evaluate the coupled nature of food and bioenergy production, water quantity and quality, and climate and hydrologic processes in response to environmental forcings and human interventions. This activity will advance the transdisciplinary science by building diverse systems knowledge to address critical issues of vulnerability, resilience and sustainability. Specifically, the project will develop a scale-dependent approach for coupling, predicting and applying the interactive water, carbon, and nitrogen cycle processes with agriculture, water resources, the biofuels industry and economic practices. This will enable the larger-scale impacts of external forcings (e.g., increasing climate extremes and population demands) to be directly coupled to the impacts of human interventions (e.g., infrastructure and management) and decision level information. It will improve the scientific basis for decisions in sustainable agricultural food and bioenergy practices, water resources management and pollution assessment, hydroengineering design, and adaptation and mitigation strategies.